Summary Christina Rossetti OCR 'Selected Poems' Summaries
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Course
Drama and poetry pre-1900
Institution
OCR
Essential for those studying Christina Rossetti's poetry, these comprehensive summary notes distil the crucial information and quotes from all the poems featured in the OCR A-Level English Literature specification. This allows you to get to the core of what each poem is saying, the themes it addres...
Christina Rossetti Poetry
‘Song’
The speaker commands, in the first stanza, that her relatives do not mourn her death,
appearing ambivalent towards her own memorialisation (‘And if thou wilt, remember/And if
thou wilt, forget’). In the second, the speaker thinks about all of the negative aspects of life
that they will be removed from through death
‘When I am dead, my dearest/Sing no sad songs for me’ – doesn’t want traditional funeral
life, ordering people not to be exhibitionist in their grief. The speaker’s austerity contributes
to the tone of apathy and resignation
‘Haply I may remember/And haply I may forget’ – uncertainty about the afterlife, presents it
as a kind of abyss (soul sleep?) contrary to Christian doctrine
Nihilism, detachment and resigned tone typical of religious doubt and a bout of illness
Death is a release (‘I shall not hear the nightingale/Sing on as if in pain’) as the speaker will
no longer have to experience negative things in the world. Subversion of the image of a
nightingale’s song to associate it with pain and death
‘Remember’
The speaker discusses her own death (morbid tone – links to Rossetti’s illness) and explores
how her lover might respond following it. Ends on an uplifting note that life carries on in the
wake of death
Petrarchan sonnet (inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and subversion of the
traditionally male voice) – stereotypical images of romantic love (‘When you can no more
hold me by the hand/Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay’)
Less detached than she is in ‘Song’ – more emotional investment in the people left behind
after death (‘Better by far you should forget and smile/Than that you should remember and
be sad’)
Remains melancholic, but permits the addressed lover to remember her nonetheless,
acknowledging the value of their relationship
‘Gone far away into the silent land’ – metaphor for Heaven, but not the bright glorious
Heaven of Christianity. The distance and vastness of death is a boundary that cannot be
recrossed (like the motif of a door in A Doll’s House)
‘From the Antique’
The speaker wishes that not only were she not a woman, but that she were not alive at all,
since she is world-weary and believes that life will never change
Simon Avery: Rossetti is “austere” with her language choices – sense of things as bleak and
hopeless
Life itself is bad, but for a woman it’s even worse (‘It’s a wear life, it is, she said/Doubly blank
in a woman’s lot’). Rossetti believed all woman should be well-treated and respected but not
equal politically. She opposed women’s university education and signed petitions against
female suffrage, from the biblical understanding that women come from, and therefore
should be subject to, man. To give them the vote would create a false equality
Inability to take joy from the natural world, pointlessness of everything, monotony and
pessimism is typical of Victorian poetry. Perhaps an expression of doubt since she’s not
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